Classical

And, we hope, the good health of James Levine Here’s my Top 10 list, in chronological order, of some of the season’s most appealing and important classical music events: symphonies, chamber music, operas.

Michael Tilson Thomas leads Tanglewood's opening night Michael Tilson Thomas — music director of the San Francisco Symphony and former assistant, associate, and principal guest conductor of the BSO — was once considered a likely BSO music director.

A new landmark for the Landmarks Orchestra "Free, friends, and Fenway Franks — all F's!" the young woman answered when I asked why she was at the very first symphonic concert at Fenway Park. "I've got one more F for you," she told me during the intermission.

A new beginning for the music festival Pianist David Deveau, celebrating his 15th year as director of the Rockport Chamber Music Festival (now Rockport Music) and the opening of the elegant, $20 million Shalin Liu Performance Center on Main Street, said that the sound in the new hall, at the rehearsal he'd heard that afternoon of the original chamber version of Wagner's Siegfried Idyll , had moved him to tears.

De Niro Pops Off Dept. Movie stars aren’t the usual Symphony Hall crowd, but last week, two dark-suited ushers swung open the doors of the Hatch Room and out poured Robert De Niro, Morgan Freeman, Ed Harris, and Cherry Jones.

Opera Boston’s Offenbach, Thomas Quasthoff, the BSO, Boston Baroque, and BU’s Sondheim Leaving the Cutler Majestic after the opening night of Opera Boston’s latest Offenbach, La Grande-Duchesse de Gérolstein , you could see the smiling faces of an audience that had had a good time.

“Jerusalem: The City of the Two Peaces,” live At Sanders Theatre, May 5, 2010 "You are here to kneel/Where prayer has been valid.” “Here” for T.S. Eliot was a church in Huntingdonshire, but it’s hard to imagine a place where prayer has been more valid than Jerusalem, or a place where more people have died for their faith.

BLO’s Idomeneo, BU’s Susannah, Garfein’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Zander’s Stravinsky, and Pollini’s Chopin Much beautiful music turns up in the 18th-century operatic form that’s probably most alien to a modern audience.

The BSO without Levine, Yo-Yo Ma, the Cantata Singers, American Classics, the Zerounian Ensemble This week’s health headlines also included the announcement from the Boston Symphony Orchestra that music director James Levine has been sidelined again, from the “excruciating pain” he’s been suffering since his surgery for a herniated disc.

BMOP, and the Christian Wolff festival The timely highlight of Gil Rose’s latest BMOP (Boston Modern Orchestra Project) concert, “Strings Attached,” was a new/old piece (2004, revised 2009) for two string orchestras by Scott Wheeler now called Crazy Weather — the new title taken from a John Ashbery poem that begins, “It’s this crazy weather we’ve been having.”

Boston Lyric Opera's imported Ariadne Boston Lyric Opera hasn't had much success lately with either its home-grown or its second-hand products, but its latest import — the Welsh National Opera's 2004 production of Ariadne auf Naxos, Richard Strauss's third collaboration with Hugo von Hofmannsthal, his favorite librettist — is a charmer.